This is the start of what I'm thinking will be either a three or four part fic about Sherlock as a serial killer. It's set post "The Great Game" but sometime before "A Scandal in Belgravia" and will be an AU, obviously. We're kind of starting at the end and moving backwards here, so bear with me! Hopefully this'll be a decent foray into the fandom.

"One day showing up just won't be enough. One day we'll be standing around a body and it'll be Sherlock Holmes that put it there."

/

Lestrade took him down right there in the living room—put two bullets into his chest without even blinking. I wasn't there, I didn't see it, but that's what I was told.

The gun that he'd been brandishing, a silenced pistol that he'd only just taken to using, had slipped from his hands and fallen to the ground at Sally Donovan's feet as he stumbled backwards, colliding into the shelves of the bookcase. He'd asked for me then, as Lestrade will tell me later; had called out for me as he'd fallen to his knees, the spines of Plato and Dante and Gray and all of his other favorites digging into his back. I was much too far away to hear him but somehow, I think I did anyway.

I can't remember now if he'd died instantly or if I've just fooled myself into thinking he had but either way, he was gone from 221B by the time I returned home. (I never did go to see his body. I was told that after everything was said and done, it was a fairly gruesome sight.)And I'd known what had happened right away, right at that moment. I hadn't needed Lestrade to corner me in front of the building or hear Mrs. Hudson sobbing; I just knew. I had felt the pillars of everything I'd known come tumbling down, had felt my ties to him untangle.

Because it's a really funny thing, loving someone as much as I'd loved him. It changes every bit of you; right down to the smallest particle that you never even knew existed until you'd felt it come alive in the presence of its other half. All it takes is that one particle, that one piece of you, and your whole focus shifts from your own life to that of another. He couldn't breathe without me knowing it; I guess it's only appropriate that I could feel it once he'd stopped.

But that right there? That's the tricky part. When you find that person, when you begin to live for them and only for them, you start to believe that nothing else matters. And when you believe that nothing else matters, you forget everything else that does.

And I did.

I forgot all about my morals and my loyalties, my logic and my common sense. I forgot everything except for him; how I loved him, how he loved me, how we protected each other. I looked into the eyes of men who trusted me, who took every word I said at face value, and I lied to them. I risked arrest, risked my life. I put everything I had on the line because I loved him, and because he needed me. Or perhaps it was because I needed him, and I hadn't yet realized how far that line had blurred.

And there had already been so many lines blurred. Erased, really. Completely obliterated.

He was all that mattered to me. It was my job to protect him and to keep him safe, to finish the things that he couldn't do alone. He made the messes, and I cleaned them up. We worked together. We were partners, in every sense of the word—Sherlock and ever faithful John; john and brilliant, brilliant Sherlock, bright and beautiful like a ring around the moon.

I would have followed him anywhere; would have loved him forever, if I could have. He rarely asked for anything, but I did it all anyway.

I bleached blood out of carpets and out of his shirts. I cleaned it off of his hands, off of knives, and I scrubbed it out of the beds of his nails. I fashioned silencers, created alibies, and stood watch in hallways or outside of windows and doors. I bought gloves- three, four, five different kinds-and I stole facemasks and shoe covers from the surgery.

I held Sherlock Holmes together when he'd fallen apart.

And still, even now, people always seem to want to ask me if I regret anything that I've done. They want to know if I wake up in the middle of the night, haunted by the ghosts of the things I've seen. They wonder if I still love him or if I even loved him in the first, or if I was simply just as mad as he was.

It's not much of a stretch, really. Army doctor with PTSD finds solace in a man who'd simply collapsed under the weight of his own genius, and together they work through their demons with a string of bloody, heinous deeds. Sounds a bit like the plot of a book, or maybe a film, yeah? But no—no, I loved him. God, did I love him. And it was real for us: the lust, the thrill, the danger. All of it.

And maybe I am just mad. Maybe I always have been.

But when they ask me, I'll tell them no. No, I don't regret a single thing I've done. I know that I should (and there's the difference between us, Sherlock and I) but when I stop to think, I only think of him. I only see him; slumped in his chair with the paper on his lap, eyebrows knitted together while watching the telly, smiling at me, laughing at me, loving me, yelling at me, drinking a cup of tea while deep in thought.

I should, I know I should, but I had Sherlock, and what part of that could I ever regret?